DICT: ‘Very big’ improvement in telco services by 2020

The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) on Tuesday, July 24, said Filipinos will feel a big improvement in telecommunications services nationwide by next year.

“Our
program for 2020 is that before the end of next year, our people will feel a
very big improvement in our telecommunications services nationwide,” DICT undersecretary
Eliseo Rio Jr. said during ‘The Presser’ of the Presidential Communication
Operations Office (PCOO) at the Philippine Information Agency (PIA) building in
Quezon City.

The DICT official said the improvements in telco services will stem from a high-speed Internet infrastructure to be built through its partnership with Facebook and the start of operations of Dito Telecommunity Corporation (Dito), the country’s third major telco player.

Aside
from faster Internet services at home, Rio said the high-speed infrastructure
project with Facebook will help provide Filipinos with better free Wi-Fi in
public places and better e-government services.

“We
will have then a very big bandwidth to be coming from Facebook. Two terabits
per second that we can now use for free Wi-Fi and for our e-government to give
basic services, online services, to our people even in the remotest area of our
country,” Rio said.

On November 15, 2017, officials of from the DICT, the Bases Conversion and Development Authority (BCDA) and EDGE (Facebook) signed a landing party agreement for a high-speed iInternet infrastructure project called the Luzon Bypass Infrastructure that would produce an “ultra-high-speed information highway” connection in the country.

On July 8, 2019, Mislatel Consortium, now Dito Telecommunity, was awarded a permit by the government to operate as the third telco. — Raymond Carl Dela Cruz (PNA)

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